With many hotels across struggling to consolidate payments made on their Point of Sale (POS) terminals as well as enhance their business operations, e-commerce solutions providers have urged industry players to adopt new solutions for their operations.
Indeed, the challenges in the industry have equally undermined the efforts of hoteliers to include rate policies, bookings and friendly locations for client’s comfort.
To address these challenges, hotel managers at a one-day hotel summit organised by SlimTrader, were urged to effectively run their businesses through technology-oriented solutions.
Speaking at the summit in Lagos on Wednesday, Founder, Amplitude Solutions, Bruce Prins disclosed that most of the problems affecting hoteliers in the sub-Saharan region are related to formulating a rate policy, adding that rate decision lies on the personal perception of the hotelier.
He said hotel managers are not supposed to waiver on policy, instead update it when need be, adding that only competent managers should be allowed to make exceptions with reasonable justification.
For hospitality business to move forward, hotel managers must stick to target markets while maintaining rates and quality to set standards.
He said, there is need for system automation through which reservations, payment process, room management, restaurant and sales service will conform to international standards to achieve quality ratings.
Speaking on the decision to improve the operations of hotel business in the country, Chief Executive Officer, SlimTrader, Femi Akinde said, “the vision of the company is to facilitate effortless transactions for businesses across Sub-Sahara Africa’. In working with hotels, we discovered that they face significant challenges in securing reservations to offline payments.
“We found out that there are lots of hotels that find it difficult to run its operation in terms of technology. They hire consultants to research all the available solutions and to propose one.
“SlimTrader gladly took on this challenge and we are pleased that today we can launch this much-needed solution for the hotel industry in Nigeria, tying multiple payment terminals to their physical and online reservations.
To expand this visibility further, he said, SlimTrader through its MoBiashara for Hotels Platform (MFH) has partnered with leading local and international Online Travel Agencies (OTAs).
With OTAs such as TripAdvisor or Hotelnownow.com, MFH allows potential guests to locate a Nigerian hotel based on a location and or rate specification from virtually any country in the world and allows such a potential guest to book and pay online or when they arrive at that Nigerian hotel.
Akinde said: “the firm goes further by empowering the hotel to use MFH as its PMS or Property Management System. This basically means that the hotel automatically accepts on-line bookings made through OTAs and its own website.
In his remarks on partnership with SlimTrader’s solution, Divisional Chief Executive Officer, Switching and Processing at Interswitch, Akeem Lawal said,
“In our position as Africa’s leading integrated payment and transaction processing company, we are always seeking new ways to help improve business efficiency with our funds monitoring, payments collection and fraud management solutions. This partnership with SlimTrader is one of the ways we are bringing our company vision to life”.
It was revealed that Interswitch developed customized software for the POS terminals to integrate with the PC-POS feature, while Interswitch will also provide free POS terminals to hotels that sign up for the premium service.
